[hal-00850370, v1] Hydrodynamics-Biology Coupling for Algae

61 Pages·2016·16.42 MB·English

Hydrodynamics-Biology Coupling for Algae Culture and
Biofuel Production
Olivier Bernard, Jacques Sainte-Marie, Bruno Sialve, Jean-Philippe Steyer
To cite this version:
Olivier Bernard, Jacques Sainte-Marie, Bruno Sialve, Jean-Philippe Steyer. Hydrodynamics-Biology
Coupling for Algae Culture and Biofuel Production. ERCIM News, 2013, 92, pp.47. ￿hal-00850370￿
HAL Id: hal-00850370
https://hal.inria.fr/hal-00850370
Submitted on 6 Aug 2013
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Number 92, January 2013
ERCIM NEWS
www.ercim.eu
Special theme:
Smart
Energy
Systems
Also in this issue:
Keynote
Smart Energy Systems –
A European Perspective
by Ariane Sutor, Siemens AG
Joint ERCIM Actions
PaaSage – An €8.4 Million Investment
for Bridging Clouds
Research and Innovation
A Projector as Mobile Visualization
Device on an Assistive Robot
Editorial Information
ERCIM News is the magazine of ERCIM. Published quarterly, it
reports on joint actions of the ERCIM partners, and aims to reflect
the contribution made by ERCIM to the European Community in
Information Technology and Applied Mathematics. Through short
articles and news items, it provides a forum for the exchange of
information between the institutes and also with the wider scien-
tific community. This issue has a circulation of about 8,500 copies.
The printed version of ERCIM News has a production cost of €8
per copy. Subscription is currently available free of charge.
ERCIM News is published by ERCIM EEIG
BP 93, F-06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France
Tel: [phone], E-mail: [email protected] Smart Energy Systems –
Director: Jérôme Chailloux
ISSN 0926-4981 A European Perspective
Editorial Board:
Central editor: The European Union has adopted ambitious energy and cli-
Peter Kunz, ERCIM office ([email protected]) mate change objectives to be achieved by the year 2020:
Local Editors: greenhouse gas emissions should be reduced by 20% while
Austria: Erwin Schoitsch, ([email protected]) the share of renewable energy is to be increased and energy
Belgium:Benoît Michel ([email protected]) efficiency to be improved by this amount. Furthermore, the
Cyprus: George Papadopoulos ([email protected]) EU has made a long term commitment to cut emissions by at
Czech Republic:Michal Haindl ([email protected]) least 80% by 2050.
France: Thierry Priol ([email protected])
Germany: Michael Krapp ([email protected]) So far the current strategies are unlikely to achieve all 2020
Greece: Eleni Orphanoudakis ([email protected]), targets; whilst the goal to increase the share of renewables
Artemios Voyiatzis ([email protected]) seems to be attainable, we are likely to fail on the improve-
Hungary: Erzsébet Csuhaj-Varjú ([email protected]) ment of efficiency. Also, the strategies in place seem inade-
Italy: Carol Peters ([email protected]) quate to meet the longer term challenges. Use of renewable
Luxembourg: Patrik Hitzelberger ([email protected]) energy is still limited because the development of efficient
Norway: Truls Gjestland ([email protected]) energy transport is lagging. The internal energy market is still
Poland: Hung Son Nguyen ([email protected]) fragmented and needs improvement regarding transparency,
Portugal: Joaquim Jorge ([email protected]) accessibility and choice. Fragmentation of national regulation
Spain: Silvia Abrahão ([email protected]) limits companies to act on multi-national markets and sets
Sweden: Kersti Hedman ([email protected]) barriers to fair competition. The EU must take urgent action
Switzerland: Harry Rudin ([email protected]) to select the right tools to make the energy change happen and
The Netherlands:Annette Kik ([email protected]) to move towards a sustainable energy future.
United Kingdom:Martin Prime ([email protected])
W3C: Marie-Claire Forgue ([email protected]) The current situation exhibits a number of major challenges.
Large-scale renewable energy generation is currently largely
Contributions based on wind, and plants may be installed far from existing
Contributions must be submitted to the local editor of your country power infrastructure, thus connection to the grid can present
a challenge. Owing to the inherent variability and weather
Copyright Notice dependence of energy production and the limited capacity
All authors, as identified in each article, retain copyright of their work for energy storage, balancing supply and demand becomes
also far more difficult.
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Next issue
April 2013, Special theme:
Mobile Computing
ERCIM NEWS 92 January 2013
Keynote
Ariane Sutor
Siemens AG and distribution system operators respectively. The European
EIT ICT Labs “Smart Energy Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT) is an institution
Systems” Action Line Leader of the EU with the mission to increase European sustainable
growth and competitiveness by reinforcing innovation
capacity. Within EIT ICT Labs the action line Smart Energy
Systems drives European innovation for smart energy sys-
tems regarding user involvement, business models and ICT-
supporting changes to consumer behaviour and social enabled infrastructures and mobilizes a strong network of
acceptance. It is imperative that consumers understand and industrial partners, research institutes and technical universi-
trust the process and receive clear benefits, eg energy sav- ties.
ings, more transparent billing and a business case for electric
vehicles, heat pumps and smart appliances. Demand A large number of European-level research, demonstration
response is also a central theme where consumers’ load and deployment projects focusing on the development of
reductions are aggregated to offer flexible services to other smart grids are currently underway. Most projects are sup-
stakeholders in the electricity system. ported by FP6 and FP7 but many, including the Portuguese
National Strategic Reference Framework (QREN), the
One key to the integration of intermittent and dispersed Spanish Centre for Industrial Technology Development
renewable energy and to increased energy efficiency is the (CDTI) and the German funding program “E-Energy”, also
introduction of Smart Grids. In addition to building new lines benefit from substantial national co-funding. A major part of
and substations, it is essential to make the electricity system future funding will be included in the upcoming Horizon
smarter through the introduction of Information and 2020. The European Commission funds a whole series of dif-
Communication Technologies (ICT). Smart Grids can be ferent issues concerning the implementation of smart grid
described as advanced electricity networks enabling two- technologies. Large investments are foreseen to extend
way exchange of power and information between suppliers existing grids to cope with the intermittent nature of renew-
and consumers based on the introduction of intelligent com- able sources, eg new lines, additional capacities but also bal-
munication, monitoring and management systems. An open ancing area extension, re-designed market mechanisms and
and secure ICT infrastructure is at the core of the implemen- storage integration. Research projects are addressing the
tation of the Smart Grid. Interoperability, data privacy and problem of distributed energy resources, with a focus on
security thereby play a crucial role. Currently a convergence online coordination of distributed generators and storage
towards proven communication standards and industry best devices such as electric vehicles to enhance grid stability and
practices is observed, eg Internet Protocol communication. optimization of energy resources.
For smart grids to exhibit their full potential the realization of Smart, sustainable and inclusive growth for Europe includes
physical infrastructures is needed as well as new business a shift in our energy policy leading to increasing renewable
models and regulations. There is a critical need to adopt a resources and improved energy efficiency. Smart Grids are
European energy policy to overcome the fragmentation the key enabler to achieve the policy objectives and to main-
related to national and regional policies. Management bodies tain a leading European technological and competitive posi-
at EU level include the Directorate Generals for Energy and tion. In addition to new technologies, real pan-European reg-
for Research (DG ENER, RTD) and the Joint Research ulations and markets are required. To this end, it will be para-
Centre JRC.A recent update of the European Strategic mount that partners from industry, research institutes and
Energy Technology Plan (SET Plan) describes the strategy to universities continue to join forces.
accelerate the development and deployment of cost-effective
low carbon technologies. Other related bodies include: the Ariane Sutor
Smart Grids Task Force SGTF on European regulation and
standardization, the Smart Grids European Technology
Platform ETP providing the European strategic research
agendas SRA 2020 and 2035 as well as industry driven con-
sortia like ENTSO-E and EDSO of European transmission
ERCIM NEWS 92 January 2013 3
Contents
SPECIAL THEME
This special theme section “Smarty Energy Systems” has been
2 Editorial Information coordinated byCarl Binding, IBM Research Lab, Switzerland and
Han La Poutré, CWI and Utrecht University, the Netherlands
KEYNOTE
Introduction to the special theme
3 Smart Energy Systems – A European 8 Smart Energy Systems
Perspective byCarl Binding and Han La Poutré
by Ariane Sutor
Invited articles
10 Development of the European Virtual Smart Grid
JOINT ERCIM ACTIONS Laboratory
by Kai Strunz and and Christian Wiezorek
6 PaaSage – An €8.4 Million Investment for
Bridging Clouds
11 Forecasting the Conditional Dynamic Elasticity of Electricity
by Pierre Guisset
Consumers
by Pierre Pinson and Henrik Madsen
6 Formal Methods for Intelligent Transporta-
tion Systems - A track at ISOLA’12
12 Putting Neurons in the Smart Grid
by Alessandro Fantechi, Francesco Flammini
by Bram Vonk, Robert de Groot and Han Slootweg
and Stefania Gnesi
IT for smart grids
7 Paweł Parys Winner of the 2012 Cor Baayen
14 Smart Energy Consumption Feedback – Connecting
Award
Smartphones to Smart Meters
by Markus Weiss, Friedemann Mattern and Christian Beckel
15 Meter Data Management for Smart Monitoring Power
Networks
by Agustín Yagüe, Juan Garbajosa and Mercedes Lopez-Perea
17 Designing and Simulating Smart Grids
by Jennifer Pérez, Jessica Díaz and Eloy González
18 Smart Management of Renewable Energy for Green
Transport
by Raffaele Bruno, Luca Valcarenghi, Molka Gharbaoui and
Barbara Martini
20 Real-Time Visualization of MV/LV Energy Alarms on GIS
Web Applications
by Christophe Joubert, Vicente Monrabal, Miguel Montesinos and
Carlos Sánchez
21 Using Wireless Smart Meter Networks for Power Quality
Monitoring
Joel Höglund and Stamatis Karnouskos
Supply/demand coordination
22 Smarter Energy: Opportunities and Challenges
by Olle Sundström, Fabian Müller, Carl Binding, Bernhard Jansen
and Dieter Gantenbein
24 Smart Demand-Side Response at Home
by Armin Wolf, Thomas Luckenbach and Mario Schuster
25 Market Garden: A Scalable Research Environment for
Heterogeneous Electricity Markets
by Felix Claessen, Nicolas Höning, Bart Liefers, Han La Poutré
and Peter Bosman
27 The Power Trading Agent Competition
by Wolfgang Ketter and John Collins
4 ERCIM NEWS 92 January 2013
28 A Model-Free Flexibility Management System at KU Leuven
and VITO
by Stijn Vandael, Bert Claessens, Tom Holvoet and Geert Deconinck
RESEARCH ANd INNOVATION
29 Demand Side Management for Multiple Devices
by Albert Molderink, Vincent Bakker and Gerard J.M. Smit This section features news about research
activities and innovative developments from
31 The Gamification of Agent-Based Smart Grids European research institutes
by Radu-Casian Mihailescu, Matteo Vasirani and Sascha Ossowski
48 A Projector as Mobile Visualization Device
on an Assistive Robot
32 A Marketplace-Based Approach to Demand-Side Management
by Paul Panek, Christian Beck, Georg Edel-
in the Smart Grid
mayer, Peter Mayer and Wolfgang L. Zagler
by Luigi Briguglio, Massimiliano Nigrelli, Frank Eichinger, Javier
Lucio Ruiz-Andino and Valter Bella
49 ATLAAS-P2P: A Two-Layer Architecture for
Approximated Search in Peer to Peer
Smarter buildings
by Ranieri Baraglia, Patrizio Dazzi, Matteo
34 Using an Intelligent Management System for Smart
Mordacchini and Laura Ricci
Residential Storage Systems
by Vicente Botón, Máximo Pérez, Adolfo Lozano-Tello and
50 Epeerdemics: A Peer-to-Peer Simulator Tar-
Enrique Romero
geting Epidemic-Based Protocols
by Patrizio Dazzi and Emanuele Carlini
35 The Last One out Turns off the Light - Optimizing the Energy
Efficiency of Buildings
51 gRecs: Exploiting the Power of Data Mining
by Lutz Ehrig and Danilo Hollosi
Techniques for Efficient Computation of
Group Recommendations
36 Ambient Intelligence for Energy Efficiency in a Building by Kostas Stefanidis and Kjetil Nørvåg
Complex
by Giuseppe Lo Re, Marco Ortolani and Giuseppe Anastasi 52 Utility-Theoretic Ranking for Semi-Auto-
mated Text Classification
Security by Giacomo Berardi, Andrea Esuli and Fabrizio
38 Secure Smart Grids or Say ‘Goodnight Vienna!’ Sebastiani
by Florian Skopik, Paul Smith and Thomas Bleier
53 A Radio Telescope of the Superlative
39 Preparing for the Smart Grids: Improving Information by Ton Engbersen
Security Management in the Power Industry
by Maria Bartnes Line 55 The Green-Wake Project Targets both Air
Traffic Security and Airport Throughput
40 Cybersecurity in the Smart Grid by Sébastien Lugan and Benoit Michel
by Magnus Almgren, Davide Balzarotti, Marina Papatriantafilou
and Valentin Tudor
EVENTS, IN BRIEf
41 CoppEnd – A Security System for Power Equipment
by Dimitrios Serpanos, Athanasios Safacas and Dimitrios 56 International Workshop on Information
Stachoulis Technology for Energy Applications
by Paulo Carreira and Vasco Amaral
Green IT
43 PowerAPI: A Software Library to Monitor the Energy 57 ERCIM/EWICS/Embedded (Cyber-Physical)
Consumed at the Process-Level Systems Workshop 2012
by Aurélien Bourdon, Adel Noureddine, Romain Rouvoy and by Erwin Schoitsch
Lionel Seinturier
57 Announcements
44 Smart Energy Management for Greener Supercomputing
by Mohammed el Mehdi Diouri, Olivier Glück and Laurent Lefèvre 59 In Brief
Novel energy forms
45 AI4B: Accountable IT Infrastructures for Optimizing Supply
Chains in Bioenergy Symbiotic Networks
by Theodore Dalamagas and Antonis Kokossis
47 Hydrodynamics-Biology Coupling for Algae Culture and
Biofuel Production
by Olivier Bernard, Jacques Sainte-Marie, Bruno Sialve and
5 ERCIM NEWS 92 January 2013 5
Joint ERCIM Actions
PaaSage – formal Methods
An €8.4 Million Investment for Intelligent
for Bridging Clouds Transportation Systems -
A track at ISOLA’12
by Pierre Guisset
ERCIM, together with 13 European partners, has launched by Alessandro Fantechi, Francesco Flammini and
PaaSage, a major research initiative with the goal of Stefania Gnesi
developing an open and integrated platform to support
model based lifecycle management of Cloud applications. The ERCIM Working Group on Formal Methods for
Industrial Critical Systems (FMICS), organised a track at
Cloud solutions are currently still insufficient and require a the 5th International Symposium on Leveraging
high level of expertise on the part of the developer and the Applications of Formal Methods, Verification and
provider to properly exploit the capabilities offered by Cloud Validation (ISOLA’12), held in Crete on 15-18 October
technologies. Cloud infrastructures are not standardized and 2012, to address the application of formal methods to
porting an existing application to a Cloud platform is still a model and analyze complex systems in the context of
very challenging task, leading to a strong interdependence Intelligent Transportation Systems.
between the client application and the Cloud platform.
Developing once and deploying on many Clouds is not a The term “Intelligent Transportation Systems” (ITS) refers
viable proposition as things stand. This is the challenge that to Information and Communication Technology as applied to
the PaaSage consortium will address. PaaSage will deliver transport infrastructure and vehicles with the aim of
an open and integrated platform to support both design and improving transport outcomes such as transport safety, trans-
deployment of Cloud applications, together with an accom- port productivity, travel reliability, informed travel choices,
panying methodology that allows model-based development, social equity, environmental performance and network oper-
configuration, optimisation, and deployment of existing and ation resilience. ITS is becoming increasingly important as
new applications independently of the existing underlying novel driverless/pilotless applications are emerging.
Cloud infrastructures.
Based on discussions held by the ERCIM Working Group on
“PaaSage will provide the relevant means to significantly Formal Methods for Industrial Critical Systems (FMICS), a
improve programmability, usability and performance of track was organized for the ISOLA’12 Conference to address
Clouds beyond current state of the art approaches”, says the application of formal methods to model and analyse com-
Keith G. Jeffery, scientific coordinator of the project. “We plex systems in the context of ITS. In fact, modelling and
have to admit that European industry is lagging behind in analysis activities are very important to optimize system life-
business creation and development on the basis of Cloud cycle in the design, development, verification and opera-
computing technologies”, adds Pierre Guisset, project coor- tional stages, and they are essential whenever assessment
dinator, “Our objective with PaaSage is to develop the tools and certification is required by international standards.
that will enable European small and large businesses to take
a leading position in exploiting Clouds. Typically a business The contributions to the theme “Formal Methods for
will be developing its in-house server cluster to an in-house Intelligent Transportation Systems” addressed three distinct
Cloud to obtain benefits of elasticity and eco-friendliness. aspects. The first was a general perspective on the introduc-
However, when elasticity needs to extend beyond the in- tion of formal methods in the development process of
house environment to a public cloud there are interoper- safety-critical systems focusing on model-driven verifica-
ability problems and provider proprietary solution con- tion techniques, both for functional and non-functional
straints. These will be overcome by PaaSage”. system properties. In particular, the expected impact of a
novel software development guideline for safety-critical
PaaSage is a collaborative research project co-funded under systems (namely, the avionic DO178-C standard) was eval-
the ICT theme of the 7th framework programme of the uated. For the first time, that standard specifically includes
European Union. In particular, PaaSage addresses the find- formal methods as one of the preferred development and
ings highlighted by the Commission’s Cloud Computing verification techniques.
Expert Working Group. The total investment amounts to
€8.4m, of which €6.3m is funded by the European Union. The other contributions related to two categories of systems
PaaSage started on 1 October 12012 and will last 4 years. in the railway domain, which, owing to their complexity,
pose several challenges to current software and system
Links: development techniques. The first category addresses driver-
http://www.paasage.eu/ less metros that integrate several subsystems within complex
http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/ ict/ssai/docs/future-cc-2may- architectures, which are geographically distributed, featuring
finalreport-experts.pdf strict dependability requirements. The second category is
represented by railway interlocking systems: here the com-
Please contact: plexity lies in the geographical layout of the tracks, points
Pierre Guisset, ERCIM Office, and signals that can be found in stations or in railway yards.
E-mail: [email protected] Within this context, a particularly challenging problem for
6 ERCIM NEWS 92 January 2013
current model-checking technology is to automatically We believe that, despite the limited space available in the
verify that interlocking logics designed by railway engineers program of the track, the contributions succeeded in giving a
actually satisfy safety properties (eg, two trains will never be good overview of the state-of-the-art and of the hard-to-solve
assigned conflicting routes) for medium to large stations. open issues, as well as proposing significant directions for
the future research in this field.
The lively discussion that took place during the workshop on
railway interlocking systems touched on topics such as: Link: http://www.cs.uni-potsdam.de/isola/isola2012/
• possible ad hoc optimisations for symbolic model-check-
ing, by means of specific re-orderings of BDD (Binary Please contact:
Decision Diagrams) variables; Alessandro Fantechi, Università di Firenze, Italy
• logical and physical distribution of the interlocking con- E-mail: [email protected]
trol logics;
• the increasing complexity due to the integration and inter- Francesco Flammini, Ansaldo STS, Italy
face of interlocking systems with other signalling systems; E-mail: [email protected]
• verification of legacy relay-based interlocking systems
which are strictly related to the topology of the controlled Stefania Gnesi, ISTI–CNR, Italy
layout. E-mail: [email protected]
Paweł Parys Winner of the
2012 Cor Baayen Award
ERCIM has selected Paweł Parys from the University of
Warsaw as the winner of the 2012 Cor Baayen Award
for a promising young researcher in computer science
and applied mathematics. In a tight competition Paweł
Parys was chosen from 21 excellent candidates from all
over Europe as an exceptionally gifted young
researcher.
Paweł’s main fields of interest are algorithms and computa-
tion theory. In his young career, Paweł’s research has already ERCIM president Keith Jeffery (left) presents the 2012 Cor Baayen
led to two extraordinary results in very different fields such award to Paweł Parys.
as linear time evaluation of XPath and higher-order push-
down automata. correctly for all possible inputs?” can be recast as a question
about the language accepted by a deterministic higher-order
The XPath (a language for addressing parts of an XML docu- pushdown automaton. One of the most important open prob-
ment) evaluation problem is important in practice, in partic- lems in this area was about the equivalence of two models:
ular for the performance of Web browsers which generally deterministic higher-order pushdown automata, and deter-
include XPath evaluators. These evaluators are often quite ministic higher-order pushdown automata with the so-called
inefficient, in many cases running in exponential time (in collapse operation. It has been conjectured that the collapse
relation to the size of the query). In his groundbreaking work, operation gives more power to the automata. In a series of
Paweł devised a system for evaluation of XPath in time papers, including two STACS papers and a paper accepted
linear to the size of the document. Until recently, this was by LICS 2012, Paweł Parys has proved this conjecture. This
widely believed to be impossible. The improvement is dra- settles an important, and technically difficult, open problem.
matic for XML documents with billions of nodes, such as the
DBLP database, for example. Although Paweł Parys just finished his PhD in January 2012,
his work has already been recognized with best student paper
In his research on higher-order pushdown automata, Paweł award at PODS 2009 (the top database theory conference),
could prove that collapse increases the power of higher-order the Witold Lipski Prize for Young Researchers in Computer
pushdown automata, which was a major open problem Science 2011 (an award for the best young Polish computer
(pushdown automata are used for instance in theories about scientist). He was also the recipient of a "Start" stipend for
what can be computed by machines). Higher-order push- young researchers awarded by the Foundation for Polish
down automata are like pushdown automata, except that they Science in 2012 as well as several achievements in program-
can use stacks of stacks, or stacks of stacks of stacks, and so ming competitions.
on. They appear naturally when modelling the behaviour of
recursive higher-order programs in functional languages. For more information about the ERCIM Cor Baayen
The question “does a recursive higher-order program behave Award, see http://www.ercim.eu/activity/cor-baayen-award
ERCIM NEWS 92 January 2013 7
Special Theme: Smart Energy Systems
Introduction to the Special Theme
Smart Energy Systems
by Carl Binding and Han La Poutré
Modern, industrialized, society is heavily dependent on
ubiquitous, cheap energy, which we expect to be readily
available, not to be polluting, and to be convenient to use.
Since the invention of the steam engine by James Watt, this
paradigm has lead towards tremendous improvement of life
quality in the developed world, and developing countries
eagerly aspire to similar energy standards.
However, the price of this hunger for energy is increasing.
Fossil fuel resources such as oil or gas are becoming harder
to explore, even leading to environmental disasters as with
the Gulf of Mexico oil-platform, recently. Exploration of
shale gas (“fracking”) causes negative environmental
impact, beyond the well-known CO problematics. Besides
2
the sheer availability of fossil energy, associated CO emis-
2
sions have caused wide-spread concerns about impacts on
climate and on human health (fine particle emissions).
Another kind of fossil fuel energy source, namely uranium-
based nuclear fission, has been explored for about 50 years.
It is CO neutral, but has additional risks and thus costs asso-
2
ciated with its operations. More importantly on a longer time
scale, the nuclear waste disposal has not yet found a satisfac-
tory answer. Furthermore, nuclear fission is a large consumer
of water for reactor cooling, which is considered a negative
environmental impact.
It is against this background that concerned citizens, indus-
tries, and their political representatives have shown
increased interest in the use of renewable1, natural, energy
resources. These are mainly represented by solar energy, be it
in the form of photo-voltaic or simple heat, and by wind
power. Other energy forms are based on bio-mass, wave
energy, and of course the traditional hydro-power electrical
generation plants.
1The term “renewable” being somewhat imprecise as it is the solar
fusion process – which has a long, but finite, life time, that keeps the
wind blowing and the sun shining.
8 ERCIM NEWS 92 January 2013
An important challenge of wind and solar energy is their sto- Europe's North all the way to its far South and even
chastic nature. Traditionally, power generation has been Northern Africa (spanning 24 countries and 400 million
planned based on predictions of the aggregated energy con- users) – cannot be rebuilt in a short time, given the tremen-
sumption (load). Since wind and solar energy are hard to dous costs involved and given today’s often vocal opposi-
plan, their availability is uncertain. Hence, this fundamen- tion to power grid projects in many countries. Simulation,
tally changes the traditional electrical power engineering addressed in some contributions, thus also plays a role in
equation of “generation follows load” into the challenge of planning and designing the future power grid.
“load must follow generation”.
The ultimate power users, however, remain individuals.
In addition, new devices are appearing more and more in our How can we motivate humans to use energy in a more effi-
energy ecosystem, which will influence its characteristics. cient way? We have included some papers describing how to
For example, electric vehicles and heat pumps are character- make the end-user more aware of his or her power usage and
ized by heavy power consumption exceeding those of past the use of game theory to effectively tie the end-user into the
domestic devices, but at the same time these new devices energy markets of the future. The challenge will be to make
allow for the storage of energy. And micro-CHPs (combined the end-consumer price conscious – for a commodity whose
heat and power) allow for efficient generation of power in generation and transport only costs percents of a family’s
addition to heat. These developments give new control prob- budget.
lems to be tackled, but also open up new ways of handling
our power systems. Use of bio-mass is addressed in an interesting project which
uses algae for energy production as well as the issues arising
In this special theme of ERCIM News, we are happy to with wide-spread exploration of bio-mass.
present a wide spectrum of ongoing research activities
which attempt to address today's energy dilemma. The challenges ahead are huge. Fundamental science has
found solutions to many of the smarter energy issues. It is
Better building design and technology is seen as a path for- the large scale deployment in a cost-effective, safe, and
ward to further decrease the volume of energy consumed – environmentally sound manner which has to be addressed.
always a good idea when a resource becomes scarce. In the Ultimately, the choice is ours: how much are we willing to
same spirit, we see approaches to make better use of trans- reign in, respectively reconsider, our energy household of
portation means by giving the end-user tools to select a con- the future and how much are we ready to spend on more
venient yet ecological means of transportation. effective use of energy.
The intelligent power grid is another large theme. By this, We hope that several of the projects presented here can make
we understand a more optimal usage of existing power grid a contribution on the route to a sustainable energy system,
resources to minimize waste as well as to align demand with which is, as the British physicist David JC MacKay terms it,
renewable energy generation. This amounts not only to a “without the hot air”.
large control and optimization problem, in the form of
market-based approaches and automated demand side man-
agement, but needs to be associated with a large communi- Please contact:
cations and computer infrastructure. This, in turn, causes Carl Binding
ample security concerns summarized under the notion of IBM Research Lab, Switzerland
“cyber security” which is addressed by several of the E-mail: [email protected]
ongoing projects.
Han La Poutré
A system as large as the electrical power grid – an example CWI and Utrecht University, the Netherlands
of which is the European ENTSO-E grid which ranges from E-mail: [email protected]
ERCIM NEWS 92 January 2013 9